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The suspension of ipmitool

 1 year ago
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The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 19:16 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Regardless of whether or not you think the impmitools developer or his employer bear responsibility for the war in Ukraine, the reality is Microsoft probably had no choice. If the developer's employer is sanctioned, MSFT would probably have been in hot water had they not locked the account.

I think sanctions against Russia and certain Russian entities and companies are completely appropriate, and this might just be some unfortunate but necessary collateral dammage.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 19:51 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

It is hard to protest against an established authoritarian regime especially when such regime has a lot of income from natural resources. Typically such regimes are very stable and only affected by the outside world, not own people.

People in the West had much more freedom to affect the Russian regime than the Russian people. After the occupation of parts of Georgia in 2008 it should have been clear that Russia used the income from oil and gas to fuel corruption, military build up and to suppress any protest movements. But West ignored that and decided to continue to get resources from Russia. And then the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014 was still not enough, only after the full scale aggression non-symbolic sanctions have started to be introduced. And such very-very late sanctions has to be broad and doing a lot of unexpected harm even for Western countries.

The suspension of ipmitool is related to that as it not only harm the author, but presumably also the users of the code in the Western countries, even if such harm is trivial. So treat that as payback for buying bloody oil.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 20:41 UTC (Tue) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

It's not really about punishment either. The intended target is mildly inconvenienced at best, the rest of us get a mild increase in CVEs somewhere down the line (probably sooner rather than later, now that the US has loudly Streisanded to the world "here's a backdoorable piece of ubiquitous infrastructure we've reduced the bus factor of to zero"), and pointing out the real purpose of this kind of thing would get me rightfully reprimanded here.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 21:11 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I'm not sure anyone would bother attacking ipmitool when it's so much easier just to attack buggy vendor IPMI implementations.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 20:54 UTC (Tue) by mricon (subscriber, #59252) [Link]

It's not really a "side issue" when calling this a "war" and saying that "Russia is responsible for it" is enough to get you a $10,000 USD fine and a 3-year prison term.

There are no democratic tools to change anything in Russia right now -- it's a totalitarian Stalinist regime eating itself and its neighbours.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 21:18 UTC (Tue) by amarao (subscriber, #87073) [Link]

... They just raised it to up to 15 years in prison. Saying unpleasant things (discredit) about military, mercenaries or war in Russia is a criminal offence

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 21:35 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

"The 'x' people are responsible for that war." What a peculiar statement. Where in the world is there really any legitimate democracy where mass sentiment wins? Woodrow Wilson was elected on an explicitly anti-war platform in 1916, and yet war came. Carter ran as a pacifist, and yet made "human rights" exceptions for the Park, Somoza, Pahlavi, Suharto, and Marcos dictatorships, just as a subset. Biden was elected in part to reverse the hated Trump attacks on immigrants (and many others besides) and yet has continued and even intensified most of those programs.

The ruling class around the world changes the rules as it goes along, and it only allows elections and plebiscites that arbitrate some optimal continuation of class rule, not its abolition. Your blame on the "people" is misplaced.

And causes themselves have causes. The Russian invasion is a great crime, but what of the encirclement of Russia by western-fomented right-wing coups, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine itself bringing avowed neo-Nazis to power?

I can already hear Jon appealing to end the discussion, and I do not intend to further it, only to state that things are not so simple, and issues like github hosting of software gets tied into corporate interests and therefore, given corporations are intrinsically nationally-regulated entities, international politics, their tensions carried down to low levels.

This individual issue has the great fortune that it is easy to route around the damage, and one doesn't expect to see, e.g., ipmitool being removed from the Debian repositories. But one can easily envision other instances where such enforced removals, for instance, a hostile government blocking the walled garden of Firefox browser extensions, a development many of us warned against in anticipation of future developments like these, could cause considerably greater disruption. The recent takedown of the "Bypass Paywalls Clean" extension from the Mozilla repository has affected many people, who because of Mozilla's refusal to allow client flexibility in local extension installs (without downloading wholly new "developer" versions of the browser) mean that their decision (or decisions imposed on them) bypass the freedoms they are supposedly sworn to uphold for their downstream users, their having already removed some of that freedom by holding it in trust.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 14, 2023 22:33 UTC (Tue) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

+1, more if I were able to do so.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 11:54 UTC (Wed) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

> And causes themselves have causes. The Russian invasion is a great crime, but what of the encirclement of Russia by western-fomented right-wing coups, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine itself bringing avowed neo-Nazis to power?

Avowed means that they describe themselves as neo-nazis, they do not, to top the absurdity of the accusation, The president, Zelensky, is jewish.

> I can already hear Jon appealing to end the discussion, and I do not intend to further it

Then please do not make such absurd, hateful and untrue statements.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 17:18 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Biden was elected in part to reverse the hated Trump attacks on immigrants (and many others besides) and yet has continued and even intensified most of those programs.

As a point of order, a significant part of that has been due to various court challenges that have successfully prevented him from ending most of those programs. Challenges brought by the same folks who simultaneously shout that he's ineffectual because he's not doing enough.

> only to state that things are not so simple, and issues like github hosting of software gets tied into corporate interests and therefore, given corporations are intrinsically nationally-regulated entities, international politics, their tensions carried down to low levels.

Perhaps the most primal of all "corporate interests" is the desire to continue existing, and not following the rules of the jurisdictions in which they operate [1] tends to end that fairly quickly.

When "freedom" comes into conflict with national laws, "freedom" inevitably loses.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 0:36 UTC (Wed) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]

> [...] Because their leadership is selected by them in a democratic* voting process. If the russian people (and company owners) do not want to be sanctioned anymore, they have democratic tools to change the leadership [...]

I had no idea trolling was allowed on this website.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 6:14 UTC (Wed) by wkudla (subscriber, #116550) [Link]

What a bizarre response to a legitimate remark. As a Pole I know a thing or two about living in a totalitarian regime and under a Russian boot. The people are ultimately responsible for their government. Our freedom came at the sacrifice of blood in 1980. The Chechs had their trial as a nation in 1968 and the Hungarians in 1956.
The Russian people are very different from the rest o the Slavs. That's why you saw no such effort from them post-revolution.
We were all oppressed, but our nations chose to do something about it; theirs did not. It's a matter of mentality.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 10:07 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

Italy's elections were counted as "democratic"… but USA had set up a stay behind organization (gladio) to stage a coup, should the result not have been the desired one.

The first elections happened with the allied navy ready to invade, in case the communists won.

Are western democracies any more democratic?

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 12:25 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Are western democracies any more democratic?

Hell, yes. I invite you to compare the rights and freedoms granted in a liberal democracy such as Canada or Sweden with the oppression found in Russia. They are worlds apart.

Liberal democracies have their flaws. Canada's treatment of its indigenous people, for example, is a national shame which has not yet been dealt with properly. The difference is that liberal democracies are at least trying to do better, while Russia is regressing and becoming more and more repressive.

How about the suspension of nationalist hostility on LWN?

Posted Mar 15, 2023 11:04 UTC (Wed) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

The Russian people over the last hundred years and longer have also been under the boot of often-totalitarian leaders whom they have been powerless to change and who have caused them some abominable sufferings. I am very hesitant to ascribe too much blame to those who have often been helpless victims.

In the meantime, what still unites us is our love of FOSS and respect for all the competent diligence that has gone into it, from Poles, Russians, Australians, Brits, Americans, Canadians, etc, etc, etc. Hearty props to you all!

How about the suspension of nationalist hostility on LWN?

Posted Mar 15, 2023 12:22 UTC (Wed) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]

Amen to that!

How about the suspension of nationalist hostility on LWN?

Posted Mar 15, 2023 12:41 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link]

Poland hasn't existed for 150 years as a sovereign state and yet Poles knew damn well that it's not a natural state of things.

Russians had their chance in 1990's, but they decided that an authoritarian KGB agent is a better "leader" than somebody more pro-European like Yeltsin.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 12:43 UTC (Wed) by mvar (guest, #82051) [Link]

by that simplified (to put it lightly) logic the civilians who died in the 9/11 attacks were culprits to the US government doings in the middle east for the past half century. This is quite an epidermic analysis of an overly complex matter such as geopolitics between imperialist states.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 13:06 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

If the people of a country engaged in aggressive wars abroad can be held responsible individually for their government's choices, with consequences such as exclusion from technical, professional, social, and sporting forums, then it would be interesting to get the views of people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc., etc.

The suspension of ipmitool

Posted Mar 15, 2023 17:19 UTC (Wed) by opsec (subscriber, #119360) [Link]

> This isn't about danger of the software. The suspension is a result of a SANCTION. It's a
> punishment for starting a war in a neighbor country.

There were similar cases of aggression in recent history, yet somehow we're not
punishing every perpetrator (be it country or company or citizen) in a similar fashion.
This logical disconnect might end up in major disasters down the line.

I hope you can reflect on this comment in a unbiased way.


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